Despite being an ECE major, I didn’t really bother doing anything with Linux until two things happened at the same time:
I started having to work in several different build environments that were just easier to set up in Linux
I started running Minecraft servers/doing server modding (starting back in the days of Hey0’s server mod and carrying up through Bukkit).
I wouldn’t call myself an evangelist at all. If you’re doing something that I think will be specifically easier to do in Linux (mostly servers and specific kinds of software development), I’ll point out how… but I find that a lot of people’s advice on “use Linux and X FOSS tool” ends up being akin to giving someone bike shopping advice on which welding torch to use to construct their bicycle frame.
I am interested in tech, and also watched a lot of YouTube videos about different topics. Somehow I realised how much data windows sends. Since I was planning to buy myself a new pc(my old one was a Celsius W370 from 2009 that took 20 minutes to boot windows) I decided to not install Windows on this pc but to install Linux. I went the classic way and chose Mint with cinnamon.
That was about 1.5 years ago.
I wouldn say that I’m somehow obsessed with Linux and there’s definitely no way back. I got completely sucked into FOSS. My next phone will be a Google pixel where I will install Graphene OS on. Fuck big tech.
Had an old laptop which ran horribly slow on windows. Put Ubuntu on it without knowing anything about that stuff. Years later, I got interested in computer science and Cybersecurity, made some experiences with Kali Linux. Eventually switched my desktop to Linux mint iirc. My servers tun Debian
That old laptop? I used it for the first months of Cybersecurity lectures, until I bought a new laptop with my first salary. This weekend I put LMDE 6 on it. Debian is home.
in the fall of 2002 the windows millennium installation on my computer broke, trapping an entire semester’s worth of work on the hard drive and i was a starving college student with less than $20 to my name, so i couldn’t afford to buy windows xp and didn’t know anyone where i could get a pirate copy from.
i bought a mandrake linux cd pack for $8 from circuit city and used google in the computer laboratory to learn how to mount the hard drive, install drivers for ntfs and copy my all my work to a usb drive and i’ve been using linux ever since. i switch to 100% only linux both professionally and personally sometime around 2010.
I was PMing a student project for NASA and the sheer number of tabs and files I had open on my PC killed Windows.
I had a week until the deadline and I’m in a situation where things may or may not save, basic functionality was questionable and I had literally thousands of pages information to format and get out.
Once I turned it in I installed Linux and never looked back.
At the time, Windows was updating and restarting whenever it felt like it which would stop my Plex server from running until I logged back in. Windows and Macs are now just thin clients that allow me to connect to all my Linux servers.
work requirement, amphetamine-driven endless curiosity of staring at commands and man pages, interest in programming, initial allure of the concept of copyleft
Back when the world was young, I had to produce a fairly large chunk of documentation which I started to write in MS Word 2.0 (which ran in Windows 3.11 or Windows for Workgroups).
However, at around 100 pages, I started to have trouble with file corruption. So since the company I worked with had contacts with Microsoft, I got in touch with them. “yes that’s a known bug, there’s a new version on this FTP site” (we were in the nascent ISP business).
So I got Word 2.0c. Which promptly crapped all over my document. “Oh, yeah, I guess the bug isn’t fixed then”.
Around the same time, a coworker had been telling me about those guys who were busy writing a Unix from scratch (hah, so silly) and who had, already gotten a usable and stable system (wait, really? cool!). So I grabbed a copy and tested that. It ran fine (it did help that I already knew a bit of Unix). And I did my document there, I don’t remember in what, if it was LaTeX or Applixware (maybe that came later).
Since then, Linux has always been on my desktop, with Windows coming and going on a secondary disk or partition, mostly relegated to the running of games.
I was at CompUSA back in the 90s and there was a Red Hat box with a manual in the clearance bin. I think it was Red Hat 4. I took it home and installed it on an old computer. I mainly used it as a server for testing Perl scripts for my own websites but I did use it as a desktop some.
I was a Windows N/T and Novell Netware administrator at the time and the company I worked for needed a “Linux guy”. Most people had barely heard of Linux so I became the de facto Linux admin. I ended up managing an Apache server and writing what was really just an API that ran under mod_perl. It returned structured text like modern APIs (JSON wasn’t a thing yet).
Now almost 30 years later and I still love Linux. Linux powers my life. I run my own email and web servers. I self-host lots of stuff. I’m not a big fan of desktop Linux but I work on Linux servers all day long. I have no desire to come home and fuck with my workstations.
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